


The Scarlet Letters

by mylittleredgirl



Category: Stargate Atlantis RPF
Genre: Adultery, Angst, F/M, RPF, Romance, all aboard the fast train to a very attractive hell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2021-01-08 06:21:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21231218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mylittleredgirl/pseuds/mylittleredgirl
Summary: A is for Adultery.





	The Scarlet Letters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anr](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anr/gifts), [phrenitis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/phrenitis/gifts).

> thanks to anr for the beta and to the three other people reading this for their decade of patience in between when i said "i'll post the rest tomorrow!" and right now.

**\- Adultery -**  
  
He looks it up.  
  
_n. Voluntary sexual intercourse between a married person and a partner other than the lawful spouse._  
  
He knows what it means, of course, but something in him needs to double-check, the part of him that takes comfort in clearly defined statements of fact. It’s just that, on paper: a well-reasoned definition. Comforting. There are no emotions involved.  
  
There’s afternoon sun draped across her bed, across her bare skin. His eyes follow the trail of the sheet kicked to the floor, up her legs, the hollow of her spine. The clock on her nightstand tells him he should go—it’s after 3 pm already, and he was only supposed to be going out in the middle of a Sunday to run some errands, to swing by Torri’s place for the staging notes he forgot to copy from her notebook last Friday. He wills the clock to slow down as his mind prepares excuses for why he was gone so long, why he might be gone longer still. The excuses come easily now; he practices them in his head even when he has nothing to lie about.  
  
Torri stirs. She asks, “Are you going?” in a voice that’s still mostly asleep, and he knows she’ll drop back off either way before he gives her his answer.  
  
He puts down the dictionary—it’s hers, a standby of her old theatre kit for decoding hidden meanings in the plays of dead authors—and waits for her breathing to even before crawling in beside her for as long as he dares.  
  
There’s very little reason in this, and far too much emotion, but this is comforting, too.  
  
  
**\- Bibliography -**  
  
He doesn’t expect her to be so well-read.  
  
He has only known his co-stars for a matter of weeks, but ten years of on-again off-again acting work has given him a long list of stereotypes to choose from, and it doesn’t take long to peg the new cast of _Stargate: Atlantis_.  
  
David is the class clown, saved by a hidden professionalism—he shamed them all on his first day by banging out three pages of technical dialogue in a single take. Rachel’s the cheerleader—the actor-dancer-singer with a high-pitched giggle and the unenviable task of creating a character from vague instructions like “be sexy, but strong in an alien way.” Rainbow is the rookie, wide-eyed and eager in a way that makes Joe try to remember if he was ever that young.  
  
He isn’t sure what to make of Torri. She bugs him, he thinks.  
  
She’s the one who convinces him to join the rest of the cast for Friday night drinks, mostly by asking for a ride. _You should come. Rainbow’s trying to create a tradition of group alcoholism_. Recently Joe became too old for that—not in years, but old with two kids and a wife who says he doesn’t see them enough—but Katherine and the boys are spending the week in L.A. with all the furniture that hasn’t made it across the border yet, so he has no excuse.  
  
They stop at Torri’s place so she can get supper for her dog, a white mutt who pounces on him in happy greeting like he isn’t a perfect stranger. While Torri makes kissy faces and gets licked on the nose, he’s left standing in her living room with boxes of books.  
  
He opens the nearest one when curiosity gets the better of him. He finds the heartwarming coffee table books about rescued dogs that he expects, and the well-worn copies of Chekhov’s complete works and _A People’s History of the United States_ and _The Science of Critical Thinking_ that he definitely doesn’t expect.  
  
“Have you read all these?”  
  
She emerges from her bedroom with a smile. “Most of them. The box next to the kitchen stuff has the ones I’m still working on.” She’s wearing fraying jeans and a black top just bordering on low-cut.  
  
Joe thinks that maybe there are some people left in this business who can surprise him after all.  
  
  
**\- Cars -**  
  
The first time she kisses him is in the back seat of a car—Jason’s fiancée’s car, if she can remember correctly. That isn’t a given, because there was a lot of alcohol involved.  
  
Jason’s outside the car arguing with Simmone about something (maybe which of them is sober enough to drive to the next pub on the crawl, the one where David’s friend so-and-so is the manager or bouncer or something and they promised to make an appearance after getting thoroughly trashed at _Aqua_). She and Joe are arguing inside the car, too, but she doesn’t remember a word of it, because she pokes him in the chest to make a point and he kisses her.  
  
Really _kisses_ her. Drunk and accidental (probably), but for long seconds she forgets where she is in the sandpaper skin on her face and the electric shock of his tongue trailing against hers, whiskey and gin and tonic and Joe and—  
  
_That_ she remembers clearly.  
  
The front door opens onto the argument outside, and she pulls back. This is wrong, she knows, but she can’t immediately remember why.  
  
“Fine, then, _you_ fucking drive if you’re so sure where it is,” Simmone says, throwing the keys onto the driver’s seat and stalking away down the block, and the moment is over.  
  
The second time they kiss is on the set, for the sixteenth episode of the season. In their blocking run-through, he doesn’t look her in the eye.  
  
It’s less than a week before they’re in another car together—hers, this time—and they do it again.  
  
  
**\- Divorce -**  
  
Torri is sitting on the edge of the bed, head down.  
  
“I’ll leave her,” he promises.  
  
She shoots him a look over her shoulder, pained and frustrated.  
  
When he sees her upset, all he wants to do is comfort her, feels the need to _fix it_ like a restless animal in his chest until he’s holding her again. When he sees Katherine, lately, he thinks about whether he took the trash out wrong and prepares for the ten thousand arguments they have daily—the only things they ever really say to each other anymore.  
  
When his marriage ends, it won’t be entirely because of Torri.  
  
  
**\- Elizabeth -**  
  
He doesn’t hear it from her, but then, he doesn’t have to.  
  
Ever since the words _contract negotiations_ got murmured on-set, Joe has felt like the proverbial other shoe has been dangling right over his head. Torri has been irritable, stressed and exhausted, but worse, she’s been _distant_. For desperately selfish reasons, this couldn’t be happening at a worse time.  
  
Katherine is moving his children to L.A.. She has a lawyer. She doesn’t have to name aloud the reason for why she’s putting nearly three states and an international border between them, but she explains anyway, because she’s fair like that.  
  
“I came here for _your_ career, Joe,” she reminds him one night. They still share a bed whenever he’s allowed back home from the heartbreak hotel, but it doesn’t feel like _sharing a bed_ anymore as much as leasing adjacent sleeping space. “If you’re not taking this family seriously, I have no reason to stay and watch.”  
  
He doesn’t know what’s worse—that he knows she’s right, or that he’s a little bit grateful he didn’t have to make the decision himself.  
  
And Torri—  
  
God, _Torri_.  
  
She hasn’t spoken to him in a week, because all her conversations are with her agent except when she’s speaking scripted dialogue through tight lips. They exchange memorized phrases in front of a green screen, and that isn’t even close to what he needs right now, but he has no idea what he’ll do if that, too, is taken away.  
  
The official news comes down on a Friday, and it feels like a sucker punch. He can’t breathe, and none of his thoughts are for the show or ratings or character development or Doctor Elizabeth Weir.  
  
He’s going to lose her. All at once, he’s losing everyone he cares about.  
  
Rachel elbows him unkindly when he doesn’t respond aloud to the announcement fast enough. “Doesn’t this upset you?”  
  
He feels like the walls are closing in and somehow, from the outside, it must look like he doesn’t care.  
  
“It’s just business,” he tells her, and leaves the set as quickly as he can.  
  
  
**\- Fuck -**  
  
There are eloquent words to describe what’s happening, but she doesn’t know them, and they might not even be in English. All she can say is “Fuck, _fuck_,” and those words are coming out automatically, because her brain has entirely turned to mush.  
  
That thing he’s _doing_, what his tongue is _doing..._  
  
“Fuck,” she says again, because whenever she swears he chuckles a little, and that slight rush of air is almost almost almost enough to push her over the edge.  
  
Her fingers wrap tighter around the hotel closet bar and she blindly elbows one of his shirts—miraculously still hanging up—even farther out of her way.  
  
“Keep doing that,” she orders.  
  
He mumbles something in response that might be a reply, or a laugh, or nothing at all but _sensation_, holy hell.  
  
It was all true. Married men did it better. They’ve been trained, broken in-  
  
“_Dammit_,” she swears again, and she has no _idea_ where he learned that particular trick, but she’s going to demand that any and all of her future lovers take lessons.  
  
If she ever has to have another lover.  
  
_No, no, no—_she can’t think those thoughts, _doesn’t_ think those thoughts, but she’s here, naked from the waist down, hanging onto a hotel closet bar for dear life while her co-star friend lover _Joe Joe Joe_ gives her one last flick of the tongue and then stands up and fucks her. Hard.  
  
Because she asked him to. They’re hiding out in Victoria, and at the Applebee’s down the street from the hotel, she leaned over the overdone steak and told him, in no uncertain terms, how she wants it.  
  
Just like this.  
  
Lights begin to go off behind her eyes. She always comes long and hard when she’s standing, and when he bites down into her shoulder it’s like he’s releasing the pressure on the hundred thousand things she doesn’t think—  
  
_fuck me like this, harder, all the time—  
  
—every night—  
  
better not still be sleeping with your wife—  
  
—mistressadulterertrampwhore—  
  
love you more than—_  
  
She must have been screaming, because the silence afterwards is deafening.  
  
He whimpers, cock twitching inside her as her muscles shiver, and she can tell by the pitch of the growl in his throat that he is so, _so_ ready.  
  
“Fuck,” he grits out. “That was _hot_.”  
  
She grins. She likes it hard, punishing, a little painful. Usually, he likes it slow. She uncurls one hand from the closet bar and gently touches his neck, then kisses along his jaw, no suction, no teeth. She does her best not to mark him, not to leave physical evidence while he still belongs to another woman.  
  
Joe has no reason not to mark her, so she bears the proof for both of them.  
  
On her own power, Torri draws herself off him, just a little, enough to bring out another moan. “Stick around,” she tells him, voice almost too low for her to recognize it as her own. “It gets better.”  
  
  
**\- Gus -**  
  
They don’t call him a save-the-marriage baby, but he is. Things were perfect between them right before Truman was born, blissfully so. Nothing much has been blissful since then.  
  
When Katherine tells him they did it, she’s pregnant, he feels like he’s seeing her the same way he did three years ago, four, five, and wonders how he missed it this long. Where she’s been.  
  
He doesn’t know why he’s thinking of his co-star, though. For some reason, he doesn’t want Torri to know about the baby.  
  
Some reason. He knows the reason, whenever they’re working late (they do, a lot, more than he should with a wife and children), when they’re all out drinking together (again, more than he should), when he’s falling asleep. When Torri gets that look in her eyes, the one that says _maybe_, and his heart starts hurting like he’s made a desperate mistake, even though he hasn’t touched her yet.  
  
He thinks that _not_ touching her, letting her slip past him unloved and unexplored, is really the mistake he’s afraid of.  
  
Which might be why, even with a pregnant wife and a marriage he’s working on, he doesn’t let her slip past. Twice. Three times.  
  
When Gus is born, he’s perfect. Head ugly and misshapen, as babies’ heads are, and it makes Joe laugh and think of how scared he was in the beginning that he’d drop Aidan whenever he held him, and how two children later he still thinks the same thing. Gus is the first of his kids to be born bald—he maintains to this day that Truman came out with a fauxhawk—and the fine hair on his scalp tells him this baby will be fair, like Katherine’s mom. His little fingers grab everything and hold with surprising strength.  
  
The baby doesn’t solve all their problems.  
  
It’s over a month before show-and-tell day at the set, by which time Gus’s head has returned to a head-like shape and Joe has slept for an aggregate eight hours since the baby’s birth. He picks a light shooting day to have Katherine drop the baby by for an hour, so only half the cast and crew are there.  
  
Gus is passed around, either happy with all the hands holding him or completely oblivious to his surroundings. When show and tell is over, Joe sits on the outside steps, watching Torri hold the baby.  
  
“Look what he can do,” Joe brags, moving his finger in front of the baby’s face for the big blue eyes to haphazardly follow.  
  
Gus turns his face away, rooting into Torri’s chest. Joe’s stomach drops out at the picture, and for one guilty minute, he pretends, offering Gus a finger to hold and touching Torri’s knee.  
  
When Katherine’s SUV pulls up, Torri goes back inside, and he brings the baby over to his wife.  
  
He fumbles one-handed with the car-seat until Katherine steps in and secures it with sharp, practiced motions.  
  
“I don’t want her holding him,” she says.  
  
“That’s not fair,” he answers without thinking.  
  
Katherine doesn’t even seem angry, only cold. “Joe, what you do is one thing, but I don’t want her touching my baby.”  
  
There’s nothing he can say. He wants to argue, but he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. He lamely holds out the diaper bag instead.  
  
She doesn’t make him say anything in particular before she drives off.  
  
  
**\- Hotels -**  
  
Somewhere between Boston, Toronto, Chicago, San Diego, they find a routine.  
  
Her agent doesn’t ask why she’s suddenly so happy to do conventions, even though Sedge misses her just as much when she’s out of town and the show’s fans haven’t gotten any saner.  
  
There’s something delightful about the way parts of the audience literally shriek whenever she and Joe are on stage together, and it’s silly, but it feels like they’re getting to be _together_ in public, even though no one in the audience is actually thinking of _them_.  
  
That’s not why she goes, though.  
  
“Marriott,” Joe yells. He’s lying naked, spread-eagle, on the high-thread-count hotel sheets while she dries her hair. “Definitely my favorite. Better breakfast. You?”  
  
“Hilton,” she replies without hesitation. “Their décor is much better. Don’t you remember the chairs?”  
  
He blinks. She switches off the hair dryer and when her towel slips off, she doesn’t put it back. They’re in Florida, a whole literal continent away from all the reasons they can so rarely just be _comfortable_ together.  
  
“Those chairs were at a Hilton?”  
  
“_Yes._” She pouts. “I’m surprised you don’t remember.”  
  
He laughs, and God, if that isn’t her favorite sound in the world these days. He reaches blindly into the mostly melted ice bucket and flicks cold water in her direction. “Well, there were _other_ memorable things about that weekend besides the chairs.”  
  
She smirks, abandons the idea of getting dressed right away, and crawls across the king-size bed toward him. Over him.  
  
“Like this,” he hums as she slinks across his body. “This is vaguely familiar.”  
  
“I’m glad you remember,” she says and just barely touches his chest with her tongue. She likes to see how quickly she can drive him crazy, how few touches it can really take until he can’t stand it anymore.  
  
His hands are still wet with ice-water when he breaks and pulls her, laughing, down to the bed.  
  
She really, really doesn’t mind.  
  
  
**\- Informal -**  
  
They meet, “have a drink,” about something else, actually.  
  
His agency contract is expiring soon, for one thing, and he needs his lawyer’s advice on renegotiation. There are some legal tax shelters that Rich has mentioned in passing before that he’d like to know more about. They talk about this year’s Colts for almost an hour, and Joe hasn’t even been following football; it’s not nearly as big in Canada.  
  
He has a few happy hour drinks in him when he slips in the hypothetical question.  
  
Rich studies him and, to his credit or to the reality of being a lawyer in L.A., begins to list Joe’s assets without passing moral judgment.  
  
Rich frowns deeper as he discusses possible settlement scenarios like the news isn’t good, but Joe feels almost shaky—with relief at getting the question out, with terror that has nothing to do with alimony.  
  
“Financially,” Rich concludes, “You’d be in a very bad position.”  
  
Joe sloshes the ice around his glass and doesn’t look up. He has the information now; he wonders if he’ll ever be brave enough to use it. “It’s not about money.”  
  
  
**\- Jason -**  
  
The first time he wakes up with Torri in his arms, he doesn’t know what to do.  
  
From the seconds before consciousness, he remembers only warmth and a bone-seated happiness, coming to with soft skin against him and even softer hair tickling his nose. He smells lavender and something else, earthy and hippie, something he associates only with Torri. Other smells start to fade in, cigarette smoke and beer and sex, but he lets those pass over him at first, reveling in this feeling, this relaxed sleepy wonderful exciting heart-filling _thank god_ feeling that it seems like he’s been missing for years.  
  
When consciousness hits, though, it does so all at once, like a car’s brakes screaming to a halt.  
  
Torri.  
  
Him. This thing, this terrible amazing inevitable thing he’s been trying to somehow avoid for almost two years—  
  
Katherine isn’t even his first thought, because he’s tangled in a bed with Torri and first and foremost he needs to figure out _where he is._ It’s not his bedroom, thank God, and from the tacked-up posters on the walls of beaches and sand and swimsuit centerfolds, he doesn’t think it’s Torri’s, either.  
  
Torri stirs behind him as he twists off the bed, grabs the nearest cloth item to wrap around his waist (a man’s sweatshirt, not his), and stumbles to the bathroom to throw up.  
  
He’s reminded more than a little of college as he gulps water from the sink tap and purges alcohol—God, how much did he _drink?_ How much did _she_ drink?—but when he was 19 and abusing the freedom of being away from home, he didn’t have this kind of responsibility, the kind that makes him think he should feel far, far worse about this than he does.  
  
He showers, brushes his teeth with his finger, and then leaves the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist.  
  
He recognizes the living room, when he finds it, as belonging to Jason’s new apartment. Jason is lying under a blanket on the couch.  
  
“Shit,” Joe says in greeting. “Did we—” he chokes on that word, and tries to rephrase, “I didn’t kick you out of your own room, did I?”  
  
Jason props his arms behind his head. “Nah. I figured you two needed it more. Someday I’ll get furniture in the other bedroom, but—”  
  
Joe’s stomach rolls over again. “Yeah.”  
  
“Torri’s in the hall shower.”  
  
“Yeah.” Now that the coast is clear, he turns around to head back to the bedroom for his clothes.  
  
Jason says, “You two were really drunk.”  
  
_No shit,_ Joe thinks, but he’s never done anything like this before, no matter _how_ drunk he was.  
  
He doesn’t make it another step before Jason adds, “It happens, dude,” but there’s a gravity to his voice that overrides the casual words, more than just flippant advice from one cheating man to another, and Joe wonders what his co-star might be able to tell about them from the outside.  
  
On the floor, his clothes are tangled up with hers, and there’s a part of him that wants to crawl back into this bed and never leave.  
  
  
**\- Katherine -**  
  
He remembers picking Katherine up from the airport those first few months in Vancouver, before the Flanigan clan was completely moved in.  
  
The first weekend, she can’t make it. They talk on the phone after the kids are in bed, him desperate for stories about his boys and overwhelmed with new things to tell her after the first week on the set. Things were stressful before he left L.A., while he was jetting back and forth for screen tests and house-hunting. The more he talks to her like this, long-distance, the more excited he gets about how moving to Canada will be the fresh start they need.  
  
The second weekend, he meets her outside the security gate. For two seconds before Aidan spots him and comes running, he sees her across the terminal lobby and is frozen in place by how utterly fucking beautiful she is.  
  
After that is a quick kiss and then kids, kids, kids—Truman scared and cranky about being away from home, Aidan with boundless energy—and Joe can’t be happier. Aidan’s learning to read and pretends to study next week’s script, liberally hi-lighting the sections he deems important. Tru is impressed by the set and the presence of spaceships, until someone points out that they don’t really fly. His kids both _love_ Rainbow, who teaches them the preschool version of breakdancing, and they can talk about nothing and no one else for the rest of their visit.  
  
Kath is impressed by the set, too. “It’s hard to believe,” she says, and he knows the feeling.  
  
They go on in this routine of occasional visits so she can set things up in Vancouver and acclimate the kids to their new house. He’s sure it will settle down eventually, but in the meantime, he’s _exhausted_.  
  
He’s never worked on a show like this, an hour-long action-adventure phenomenon with press interviews and green screens and 16-hour days spent fighting and yelling and _running._  
  
He’s guiltily grateful when Katherine cancels her plane tickets, two weekends in a row.  
  
When she comes the next time, it’s to stay. At the airport, the kids are tangled up pulling their rolling child-sized carry-ons and that gives him a minute to study his wife to figure out why he feels so _surprised_ when he looks at her, because she hasn’t changed at all.  
  
She looks very California, he realizes, with the awkward feeling of discovering that after only two months in Vancouver, he’s gotten used to it.  
  
Hopefully she will, too.  
  
  
**\- Love -**  
  
Torri gets headaches now when she sleeps with him, but only when they get closer to morning, to breakfast, to biting her tongue to keep from asking him to stay, to buttoning it down and driving separate cars to work.  
  
It’s worse on days when Katherine’s in town and expecting to see him, or when she’s in L.A. but he’s expecting her call. He doesn’t look at her directly on those days. He seems to stand, intentionally, on the other side of her kitchen or living room or bedroom, like he’s compartmentalizing her and this into a mental box that can be locked and stowed somewhere, away from the rest of his life.  
  
He’s going with Katherine to see Aidan’s school play, and she extended an invitation for him to come home from his extended-stay suite for the weekend, because the kids miss him, because they need to talk, because dammit, there’s no reason for him to be living off of instant coffee and a hotel hot plate when they can still sort it out.  
  
Torri hates herself for doing it, but she can’t help but read the emails on his blackberry. In the final account of things, that’s not the gravest of her sins here.  
  
There was a finality to the email, and whether or not Joe believes it yet, Torri knows that Katherine is only waiting until the end of the school term to move permanently back to L.A.. The unwritten ultimatum seemed to read _unless you come home,_ and that’s the part Torri wishes she hadn’t seen.  
  
Because now she has a headache, and she can’t relax, even—especially—with him asleep in her bed.  
  
She shifts to get up, to wake Sedge and go for a run even though it’s four in the morning, but she moves too quickly or sighs too loudly and Joe wakes beside her and reaches for her hip.  
  
“‘s too early,” he mumbles, a dreamy smile on his lips.  
  
She should go anyway, but she _can’t_. His pull on her is like gravity, inexorable, and when she’s this close she can’t escape.  
  
She snuggles down next to him. His eyes are open but she can’t look right into them, so she plays with his hair, hoping he’ll fall back to sleep before she says anything.  
  
He asks, “You okay?”  
  
_Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it,_ she yells at herself in her head, because no matter what she feels or how strongly, that’s one line that they _don’t_ cross. He says “I need you,” she says “I want you,” but they don’t, they don’t...  
  
“Torri?”  
  
But she’s _tired._ God, she’s tired.  
  
“Shit,” she says, then, louder than she intended, “I love you,” and something breaks.  
  
She’s broken the rules and he’s going to close off, because what else can he do? She’s thinking about his family, about his upcoming weekend, about how every morning could be the _last_ morning, about how she might be _leaving_ at the end of the season and that will be _that_, but she isn’t thinking clearly about anything or she would never have said a word.  
  
She changes her mental refrain—_don’t cry, don’t cry_—because that’s something else they don’t do.  
  
His hand tightens on her hip. His eyes pinch closed, and she can feel through the bed the way his chest jerks, just once, and it’s all way, way too intense and she craves that intensity far too much to be healthy—  
  
A run. She’ll pry herself away and go outside. He’ll fall back to sleep, forget—  
  
She barely recognizes his voice, it’s so quiet. “Say it again.” The hand tightens more, tugging her closer. “Please, Torri, just...”  
  
She can’t, she can’t say it again, but she wraps her arms around him and holds on tight.  
  
  
**\- Mistress -**  
  
He’s at lunch when she sends him a blank text message.  
  
It’s their sort-of-a-code, her way of asking _are you alone?_ in case he’s home, in case someone is there reading over his shoulder.  
  
_Lunch w David,_ he texts back the all-clear. _He’s at the counter._  
  
Torri takes more precautions than he does. It’s been two months since they’ve been doing this more than accidentally, and so much longer of driving her home and late night phone calls and thinking about her _all the time_, but he still hasn’t entirely come to terms with the reality of this, that he’s doing something _wrong_.  
  
It’s the only thing that has felt right in years, has felt like _him_ in years, even though he never, ever thought he was this sort of man.  
  
Torri’s the one with experience. She’s been the ‘other woman’ before, once when she was in college, and one other time she won’t discuss. “Before I wised up,” she says, with intentional pained irony, and he wishes that he wasn’t doing this to her, not again.  
  
She reminds him to erase his text messages, emails, cell phone call log, gives him badly needed hints on how to better step out on his marriage, and it bothers him—because it means they have something to hide, because it raises ridiculous male jealousy that she’s been with other men before, because he hates the idea that this, that _he_, might just be something she does.  
  
A habit she hasn’t broken.  
  
Something she’ll get over.  
  
She texts, _I miss you_. She’s in Toronto, visiting family on a long weekend created by a Weir-lite script.  
  
He stares at it for a minute before starting to reply. David is on his way back to the table, so he truncates his message into _Me too. Soon._ He decides he’ll wait for her at her place when she flies back, even if he can’t stay long (it’ll be Sunday morning, family time), just to see her.  
  
“Who was that?” David asks as he slides a beer across the table.  
  
“Jason asking about the time for the night call tonight.” The lies are coming easier.  
  
David buys it, or doesn’t care. While he’s talking about something else, Joe can’t help but peek back at her text from across the country. _I miss you._  
  
He doesn’t want to delete that one.  
  
  
**\- Nomination -**  
  
The evening runs late, as award dinners tend to do. Joe wasn’t sure what to expect from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror. Chris Judge told him to expect twenty-sided dice at each table, and Joe was pretty sure he was joking, but since he’s only been at this sci-fi gig a year, he didn’t rule it out.  
  
There aren’t any dice, twenty-sided or otherwise. There is, however, an open bar. Across the table, DeLuise is making puppets out of cocktail napkins, Mallozzi is talking to Amanda and pointing out mutual acquaintances at the other tables, and David’s composing a speech for Torri on the back of a paper coaster.  
  
Joe isn’t doing much of anything except wishing he were having a better time.  
  
“I shouldn’t have left Truman tonight. I should call the babysitter,” Katherine says for the fourth time.  
  
“Then _go call_,” he tells her, trying to sound less frustrated than he feels. It’s not that Joe doesn’t care—it’s his _kid_ all snotty and miserable—but he’s stressed from the red carpet and press line and the producers all expecting him to be the face of their fledgling spin-off. It’s been a rough day, and even though Joe made it here on time against all odds and is on his third drink, he can’t seem to relax.  
  
Katherine grabs her cell phone and leaves with a glare, and Joe tries to plug back in to the rest of the table. At least the others seem to be enjoying themselves. Torri is pretending to ignore David’s shenanigans, but Joe can see the amused sparkle in her eyes. She glances his way, maybe sensing him staring, and smiles like she can’t help it.  
  
David’s stage-whisper is meant to be overheard: “Torri, I’m telling you, if you don’t read this exact speech, God will kill a kitten.”  
  
Joe laughs. Torri dramatically rolls her eyes before meeting his gaze again, still wearing that dangerous smile, and his stomach flips over.  
  
He should be used to it by now—she always seems to catch him off guard, especially when he’s drinking—but it surprises him every time. She’s a beautiful woman, of course, but he works in Hollywood (or, currently, Hollywood North) and he’s surrounded by women that David likes to call “superlatively attractive.” There’s something different about Torri. Most of the time, he tries to ignore it.  
  
Most of the time, though, she’s in costume, or in jeans and a t-shirt and a haphazard ponytail, not wearing a low-cut drapey collar that teases him with the promise of so much more. Her dress hugs her chest and hips and the satin straps are just loose enough that he can imagine sliding them off her shoulders with barely a touch, kissing her naked skin underneath, peeling the fabric away from her breasts while she gives him _that smile_ and he usually tries very, very hard to never imagine anything like that.  
  
He looks away, feeling heat in his cheeks as he realizes he’s staring, and he’s no longer listening to the conversation. He’s getting aroused at a banquet table at an event full of Hollywood bigwigs and Stargate executive producers and his _wife_.  
  
If he can’t get Torri out of his head soon, can’t shake the crush he’s been nursing practically since they met, she really is going to drive him crazy.  
  
DeLuise interrupts Joe’s thoughts—thoughts he shouldn’t be having _anyway_—in a typically dramatic way: “What’s this I hear about killing kittens if Torri wins? I thought we sent out a memo about the animal sacrifices.”  
  
Torri doesn’t win. Amanda does, and SG-1 for best cable show, and Joe tells himself it’s almost as good, even though he was rooting for _Atlantis_ to show up its elders. Torri doesn’t seem to share his sentiment of this being second-best, because she leaps up to hug Amanda with genuine congratulations as soon as the closing ceremonies—such as they are—are done.  
  
Katherine gets up from the table and gathers her purse. “You can go to the after-party if you need to,” she tells him. “I’m going home.”  
  
He wants to go with the others, so much that it feels dangerous. Torri’s pull on him is stronger than usual, and he wants to follow her so sharply that the impulse feels alive in his chest. He isn’t going to do anything inappropriate, he just really wants to console her over a loss she doesn’t seem to mind at all, to get just one chance to _hug her in that dress_, to get a minute alone without David and Brad and Peter so he can tell her _it’s an honor to even be nominated_ and get that radiant smile she seems to save only for him, the one that says maybe she can’t stop thinking about him either...  
  
He wouldn’t, Joe tells himself a little frantically. _They_ wouldn’t. He’s kept his hands to himself the whole eleven years he’s been married, and most of the time, that hasn’t even been a challenge. He should go to the party and have a good time and stay out of Katherine’s hair while she tends to his kid, since she doesn’t really need him there anyway (a key theme in their seemingly endless argument about how he isn’t around enough to know what his sons need).  
  
But then Torri smiles at him around Amanda’s shoulder, her cheeks flushed with alcohol and laughter, and his palms start to sweat, his heart rate ticking up like he’s standing on the edge of a cliff. He panics.  
  
“I’m done for the night,” he tells Katherine, looking around for the clearest path to the exit.  
  
He doesn’t sleep that night. Katherine is napping in the other room with the boys, and Joe spends six hours staring at the ceiling, wondering.  
  
  
**\- Over -**  
  
They end it for the first time either twelve hours or two years after it starts.  
  
She’s standing in the bedroom doorway of Jason’s new place, wet and hungover, with only a borrowed towel between her and the sight of Joe sitting on the edge of the bed, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes, t-shirt hanging limply from the tips of his fingers. Her head hurts, and her heart (and this should never, ever have been about that), but not enough that she’s immune to the sight of him shirtless on a bed of rumpled sheets that still smell like them, together. Her stomach turns with a mix of arousal and dread, and she doesn’t know which is worse.  
  
Torri considers bolting, running out into the cold streets half-naked or just holing up in the bathroom until Joe collects his things and goes back to his wife. She isn’t stupid; he will undoubtedly being going home, no matter what she might have heard last night when she was under the twin influences of rum and his naked body against hers, both almost too intense for her to handle. He _should_ do that, should mentally categorize this indiscretion next to karaoke in Chinatown and the time they drunk-dialed Rob Cooper and Hilary picked up as horrible mistakes that should never be mentioned again.  
  
Or repeated.  
  
Joe looks utterly miserable, hunched over and deflated, and she aches to fix this. She wants to put her arms around him but knows that’s the last thing she should do.  
  
“I won’t tell,” she promises instead.  
  
His head jerks up, like that’s not the reaction he expects. “We were drunk,” he says, but there’s hesitation and a question in his voice, and his eyes are so lost and unsure and _longing_ that she can’t look at them, because her heart is already trembling and she _can’t_.  
  
“It’s okay,” she says. She’s done this before—woken up in a strange bedroom with the wrong person—but she’s almost positive Joe hasn’t. She knows how this goes. “It was one time.”  
  
She can feel the tension in his body from across the room. “So it’s just... over.”  
  
She can do this for him, can make this easy. She tries for a smile and wishes she could absolve them both. “It never started.”  
  
He gets off the bed and turns his back to her as he pulls his shirt on, gathers his wallet and cell phone and socks from the floor as she’s frozen in place, watching him separate his things from hers. It doesn’t take long.  
  
He doesn’t look at her again, and he waits outside in the rain for a cab.  
  
*  
  
It’s been two weeks, almost, and she doesn’t know if he’s avoiding her or not, because she’s really good at avoiding him. Torri has no idea what she’s feeling—and nothing good can come from figuring it out, either—so she recites _stupid mistake, just a stupid mistake_ in her head whenever she starts to think otherwise. She loves his kids, he’s been married for longer than she’s done any single thing in her entire life, and for God’s sake, his wife is _pregnant_.  
  
_Stupid, stupid mistake._  
  
When she touches herself in the bathtub, arches up on her fingers with the ghost of him above her, she’s not thinking about his kids or his commitment or the unborn child that means he’s not leaving his wife anytime soon. She comes with an edge of guilt muted by the memory of his hands and his body and his _eyes_ when he was desperate with need, desperate _for her_, and she tries to think of something—anything—else, but all her desire is filled with him.  
  
On Friday, after not speaking to her for two weeks (not that she gave him the chance), Joe knocks on the open door of her trailer.  
  
“Lunch?” he asks, and she can see him steeling himself before he looks up at her face. The fake-casual way he’s leaning on her doorjamb looks rehearsed, and surely misplaced anticipation coils in her gut.  
  
“Oh,” is all she can come up with.  
  
“Just lunch,” he says, low, and when he looks up at her again, something desperate and anxious in his eyes makes it seem like he’s begging, like he’s missed her even more than she’s missed him. “We can do that, right?”  
  
Her heart melts or breaks and she feels like she’s launching herself into mid-air without checking her parachute. “Yes. Yes, we can.”  
  
*  
  
She’s lying on the floor of Jason’s living room after smoking far more than she usually does when he invites her over for “the good stuff,” and she asks him because he knows what happened, and because he’ll tell her the truth.  
  
“Am I stupid?”  
  
Jason laughs, kicks her thigh with his foot. He managed to stay on the couch; she couldn’t resist the lure of the shag rug. She can feel every individual fiber touching her bare arms below her t-shirt sleeves, and the sensation is making her a little hyper.  
  
“No, really,” she argues with herself. “I’m making an ass of myself. But he’s just... _Joe_.” She isn’t thinking clearly enough to break it down better than that.  
  
“_He’s_ stupid,” Jason tells her supportively, “if you call him right now and he does anything except come over and fuck you senseless.”  
  
Jason and Joe are friends, have been nearly inseparable since the beginning of the season. Torri wonders what Joe has told him, what he knows.  
  
In broad strokes, she supposes it’s not a secret. She can see in Joe’s eyes, in the way he shifts his stance around her and never seems to know what to do with his hands, that he still wants her. She knows he’s been having trouble with his marriage for a long time, even with a baby on the way. She could have him again if she tried, could get another night in a strange bed, but afterwards, she’d still be here.  
  
She really, really doesn’t want to cry about this.  
  
“You know, if you just needed to get laid,” Jason quips, “I’m here for you.”  
  
She whips her head over to look at him, and he’s grinning like she just fell for one of his dumb practical jokes on the set, and it feels really, really good to laugh.  
  
It would have been easier, she concedes, but even as twisted-up as she feels right now, she still doesn’t think she could take it back.  
  
*  
  
Joe shows up at her place at two in the morning; she wouldn’t normally be awake, but she decided to rearrange her living room around nine p.m. and hasn’t found a place for everything yet.  
  
“I’ve been driving,” he says, in place of a greeting.  
  
She steps back without thinking to let him in, though she leaves her hand on the open door. Adrenaline is radiating off him, and it doesn’t smell like he’s been drinking, but this is beyond uncharacteristic behavior for him. He apologizes if he even texts her after ten.  
  
Joe’s shifting back and forth in her entryway like he could move in any direction, and she’s rooted to the spot.  
  
“It’s not over,” he tells her, looking her right in the eyes, and her knees go weak. “I don’t want it to be over.”  
  
Torri doesn’t even realize she has made the decision before she’s kissing him, drinking in the heat and the rough skin and the intensity of how he slams the door with one hand and pushes her into the wall with a groan that shudders all the way through her body.  
  
She doesn’t care anymore if it’s a mistake.  
  
  
**\- Pediatrics -**  
  
The _crack_ when Aidan hits the pavement is the worst sound Torri has ever heard, followed by the long moments of complete silence before he starts screaming.  
  
Truman screams too, startled instead of injured, and Torri drops the bag of breadcrumbs she was feeding to the birds and bolts across the few meters of park to where the boys were playing in the concrete basin of an empty wading pool.  
  
“Go get your dad!” she orders Truman, who takes off running until she calls, “Walk! Be careful!” because she’s nothing if not an expert at slamming the barn door once the horses have fled and Joe’s children nearly kill themselves while he’s off buying hot dogs.  
  
Aidan’s skateboard is lying nearby with a cracked deck—hopefully _that_ was the source of the sound she heard and not his skull—but he’s still screaming and when she kneels next to him he grabs one of her arms with surprising, terrified strength.  
  
“You’re okay, you’re okay,” she tells him over the icy panic filling her chest. “Breathe, Aidan.” Sedge has come over to investigate the commotion, and Torri shoves her away. “Where does it hurt?”  
  
She’s brushing his hair back from his face and that’s when she realizes he’s not wearing his helmet. Joe’s been yelling at the boys about that all afternoon—she even pointed out that he’d be a lot more convincing if _he_ wore one when he skateboarded—but lately Aidan’s been testing boundaries as soon as Joe looks away.  
  
She couldn’t have been distracted for more than a minute, watching Sedge investigate a garbage can. Whatever happened was fast.  
  
Joe arrives, breathless from sprinting with Truman in his arms, and lands on Aidan’s other side. “What happened?” he asks, looking at her, and she still doesn’t know, so he turns back to his son. “Buddy? You okay?”  
  
Truman stands behind Torri, wrapping his arms around her shoulders. She can feel his heart beating against her back.  
  
They’re not far from her place, so they stop for an icepack and to drop off Sedge, and then she drives to Urgent Care with Joe in the back seat with the boys.  
  
Joe and Aidan get out at the door and Truman comes with her to park the car. “I got eight stitches here last time!” he tells her triumphantly, pointing at his chin. “I was scared, but then I wasn’t.”  
  
“That’s good,” she assures him, and wonders how on Earth Joe can handle repeat medical emergencies. If she were a parent, she’d be a nonstop nervous wreck.  
  
Inside, Aidan is lying down over two waiting room chairs wearing the world’s saddest expression, and Joe’s just getting off the phone.  
  
“Mom’s on her way,” he tells his son. “You’re doing good. The doctor’ll be ready in a few minutes.”  
  
Torri touches Joe’s shoulder. “Should I...?” This isn’t an encounter she particularly wants to have. There’s no good way to say _not only am I sleeping with your husband, but now I’ve nearly killed your child._  
  
Joe shakes his head, and it’s the first time she can see that he’s freaking out, even if he’s acting calm for the kids. “Can you stay?”  
  
She stays in the waiting room with Truman, reading him a story from a picture book that he’s only half paying attention to. To her surprise—and probably because he’s scared in spite of his preschool bravado—he pulls himself into her lap midway through. Joe’s sons aren’t usually very physically affectionate toward her. They both like her (and love her dog), and Joe says they always ask about her when she’s not around, but Aidan at least has put together that she’s somehow involved in Daddy no longer living at home most of the time. Joe doesn’t touch her in front of them; calls her his friend. Torri doesn’t know what Katherine has told them.  
  
Katherine comes in with the baby in a carrier. “Torri?”  
  
Truman slides off her lap to hug his mother, and for a second, Torri can’t find her tongue. Finally, she manages, “They went back twenty minutes ago. I haven’t heard anything yet, but the triage nurse suspected a concussion. He wasn’t wearing his helmet,” and because for some reason it seems important not to give Katherine another reason to be angry at Joe, she adds, “I was watching him.”  
  
She fully expects Katherine to tell her to get the hell out (of the emergency clinic, of her family), and couldn’t be more surprised when instead she tells Truman, “Stay with Torri,” before heading toward the exam rooms.  
  
She’s gone for a while. Eventually, Katherine comes back to the waiting room and relays the diagnosis. “It’s a mild concussion. They want to observe him for a little while longer, but he’s had worse.” She grimaces. “He wanted to spend some time with just Daddy before I take him home.”  
  
“It’s good he’s okay.” Torri still feels like she’s shaking, and thinks she might be for days. “I’m so sorry.”  
  
“I don’t blame you,” Katherine replies, and then gives her a sharp look as if to clarify that she means for this incident _only_. “Boys do this. He’s always taking his helmet off. Joe encourages it, even if he doesn’t realize it.” Katherine ends the conversation there, calling Truman over from the toy chest to give him a juice box.  
  
It’s a strange moment, Torri thinks, and she wonders at how Katherine hasn’t completely shut her off from Joe’s boys, even though she’d have every right to. Torri wasn’t thinking when this affair started, and she certainly wasn’t thinking about her future relationship with his children or whether she should start carrying juice in her purse. Whether she’d _want_ to.  
  
“Last time I was here,” Truman tells his mom, repeating his earlier story, “I got eight stitches. Do you remember, mom? _Eight_.”  
  
Torri takes a deep breath, but it isn’t entirely relaxing.  
  
She has a lot to learn.  
  
  
**\- Quick -**  
  
Usually, she doesn’t come to the lot just to lie in wait in Joe’s trailer.  
  
Her scenes are done for the week; Joe’s aren’t, because the shooting schedule is a day and a half behind. He’s been working late and sleeping at his hotel suite instead of making it to her place. Which might—maybe—be why she’s here. Torri isn’t usually dramatic enough to credit any man with being sexually addicting, but, _well_. (At least she knows he’s similarly afflicted. Paul, David and Jason have all texted her over the last day to complain about Joe’s mood on the set, and it can’t _all_ be because he hates reshoots.)  
  
She waits almost an hour before the trailer door swings open. In the seconds before he sees her, he looks tired and frustrated, jaw tight like he’s looking for something to break, and damn, if that doesn’t turn her on a little. They’re ridiculous these days, deep in a morally dubious honeymoon ever since he moved out of his wife’s house. On Saturday he took her on the _kitchen floor_ and said it was because her washing dishes in her underwear was the hottest thing he’d ever seen.  
  
“Wha—?” He sees her, and on impulse, she crowds him back against the closed door before he can even finish the question. She kisses him long and deep, shoving her tongue in his mouth until he reacts (with arousal or surprise, she’ll take either). His costume tac vest is bulky and awkward, radio prop knocking against her shoulder when she moves, but she presses herself against him as best she can, drinking in his surprise as his hands bounce between her shoulders and her hips, clearly confused.  
  
This might be her favorite thing, this moment when his mind is still whirling even as he’s growing hard against her belly. She slides against him, relishing the evidence of what she can do to him this quickly, and he hisses and breaks the kiss.  
  
“Jesus, Torri—” He tries to take a step back, but she has him pinned against the wall and there’s nowhere to go. He shakes his head like he’s clearing it, mouth a little slack-jawed, and she can’t help but grin. A handful of expressions chase themselves across his face—lust, surprise, curiosity, and disappointment. “They’re setting up a reshoot, I can’t—”  
  
“How long?”  
  
Despite his arguments, his head moves, reflexively chasing her lips. “What?”  
  
“If you came in here, you must have ten minutes.”  
  
He gapes at her. She presses her palm between them, against his hardening erection, and he groans and his hips thrust once against her. She’ll take that as a yes.  
  
She kisses him again and isn’t at all surprised when he deepens it fast, grabbing her head and bringing her even closer. She pulls him just far enough away from the wall to wrestle his vest off his shoulders, and he lets it drop to the floor. There’s give to their costumes and she can stick her hand down his pants without even unbuttoning, and her body kicks into high gear at his hot skin in her hand. _God._ His teeth scrape against her lips and he grabs her ass, trapping her hand between them, and she changes her mind and decides no, no, _this_ is her favorite part.  
  
“Undressed,” she can just barely understand him saying with his mouth moving so hard against hers, and she likes that, she _misses_ that after their week of mismatched schedules, but her body (and the crew, probably) are saying _now, now_ so she pulls back just a few centimeters and shakes her head.  
  
“No time.”  
  
He’s never given her quite this exact look—close, yes, whenever he realizes he’s _for sure_ about to get laid—but there’s something wild and dangerous that she really, really would like to encourage more of in the future.  
  
She’s wearing a skirt, on purpose, and although she couldn’t quite bring herself to come to the lot without underwear, they’re easy enough to pull down and over her shoes while he watches her, mouth open, hands grabbing her hips.  
  
Something about knowing that the clock is ticking—or, maybe, something about the past four days without him—turns her on at lightning speed. He shoves her skirt out of the way and the second his fingers touch her she feels an arc of sensation race up her spine. His hands are hot and a little dry, with a roughness that has been drawing her attention since the first time they ever shook hands. He knows her body now, knows he can fuck her with his fingers without waiting for her to be ready and it’ll make her kiss him so hard it’s like she wants to swallow him whole. She loves this, loves the rush and the recklessness and the way her body is racing to catch up, loves how it’s a little bit painful, loves _him_.  
  
She tries to move away, aware they need to avoid him pressing into her when he’s still wearing costume pants, but he curls his fingers inside of her to hold her there.  
  
“Oh,” she wants to tell him what she was thinking, about the pants and wardrobe and being careful, but her brain freezes. “_Yes_.” Her body and brain are at cross purposes but somehow she convinces her hands to undo his pants and push them over his hips.  
  
“You first,” he says, grinning at her even as he gasps in a breath as he’s freed from his clothes. He’s hard and impressive and _beautiful_ and she shoves his t-shirt higher on his chest and that’s really the last thought she can have for the costume department, because they’re on deadline and there’s just no way she can wait.  
  
“No time, remember?” she says, and it might just be an excuse to get him _inside her now_, but he takes it. She grabs his hips for balance and curls one leg around his and fuck, _fuck_, her head slams back against the door (how did he turn them around without her _noticing_?) and energy is rushing behind her eyelids and this, oh god, this is _almost, almost_ her favorite part. He slams into her while she chants “faster, faster,” his fingers coming from somewhere to add to the sensation. She loses track of what she’s saying, isn’t even sure it’s _words_, and her entire focus is on him pushed against her and _moving_ between her legs and she hears him groaning out a warning, hips jerking sharply as he outpaces his rhythm, and her head slams back one more time as she comes long and hard like waves crashing into a breaker.  
  
Joe’s face is pressed into the curve of her neck. “_Jesus_,” he says, voice a little shaky. “We have _got_ to do that again.”  
  
She laughs, pushes him away from her enough to see him. He’s disheveled and flushed, skin a bit damp. He’ll probably have to get a pass through makeup again to get the shine off, and they’re _professionals_, but she doesn’t feel the least bit guilty.  
  
Outside, she hears one of the guys yelling for marks. _Perfect timing_, she thinks.  
  
He still hasn’t let go of her, hands wrapped around her ribcage. She finds it achingly sweet the way he always wants to keep physical contact with her as long as possible after sex—even when they weren’t serious, even when this was a _mistake_—and she really hopes he gets to come over after filming. Maybe he’s made her an addict for that, too.  
  
“Better clean up,” she tells him. “John Sheppard to the rescue.” She can’t help thinking that it’s a good thing his hair _always_ looks this way.  
  
He grins and kisses her quickly. “You know, you can surprise me in my trailer any time you want.”  
  
She smiles, feeling the aftershocks move through her like a pleasant hum. “Even if you only have ten minutes?”  
  
He bobs his head. “Especially then.”  
  
He cleans up, redresses, and is out the door before she even finds her underwear.  
  
She leaves the lot without anyone else noticing her.  
  
  
**\- Rain -**  
  
There’s something charming, Joe thinks, about Torri on a location shoot. She spends less time tromping through the rainy woods at night than the rest of them do, so she finds it novel, if cold. She’s been extra cheerful since Peter stopped by to change the scene—“Don’t say I never did nothing for you, Tor”—and give Elizabeth a gun.  
  
Since then, she’s been laughing with Rachel and David, doing a send-up of Charlie’s Angels while they wait for the cameras to set up. He’s really not in the mood—not in the mood for the reshoots, or the rain, or the three hour cold silence he shared with his wife after dinner—but even he has to smile when Torri mimes John Sheppard dramatically saving the day.  
  
“Give me that,” he calls. “You don’t start this scene with it anyway.”  
  
She pouts, but hands it over, and he holsters the gun. “You’re no fun.”  
  
The floods go out and someone yells, “Sorry!” and “Dammit!” and “Everybody sit tight!” followed by commotion and people theoretically fixing the problem.  
  
He groans. They’re going to be here all night.  
  
There’s enough light from other sources to see, but barely. The rain is getting heavier, and he sees Torri’s silhouette looking up toward the sky. She says, “We’re going to have to go through hair and makeup again.”  
  
“Not if you quit horsing around in the rain.” He looks around and decides they’re too far from the trucks to travel safely in the dark. Fortunately, he’s filmed here before, even if she hasn’t. “Come on.”  
  
The cave isn’t nearly as deep as they make it look on the show—it’s more of an alcove, really—but it’s got a good stone overhang, and there’s a dry rock inside to sit on that’s only just big enough for two people. Torri joins him on it without hesitation; since the beginning, he noticed she doesn’t have much use for personal space, but somehow it’s never bothered him. He tries not to think about why that might be, or why, sometimes, she makes him need to remind himself a few times a day that he’s a _married man_.  
  
“So you’re in a mood tonight,” she comments. She’s never been much for indirectness, either. For all the talk of Canadian politeness, his co-stars are all pretty blunt. Torri apologized to him when he stepped on _her _toe, but she’s also be the first to call him out if he does something she doesn’t like.  
  
If only it were as easy to know where he stands with all the women in his life.  
  
He deflects. “It’s not a great night for a shoot.”  
  
“We could always wait until it stops raining,” she deadpans, “in June.”  
  
He doesn’t respond.  
  
“Trouble in paradise?” she guesses.  
  
He shoots her a surprised look. “What makes you say that?”  
  
She somehow laughs and winces at the same time. “Oh, last week, when Kath was waiting for you to finish up with Brad, she went off about how much she hates it here. I told her we’d have drinks soon, but...” Torri shrugs, her arm brushing against his.  
  
Katherine has a strange relationship with his coworkers, almost jealous because of how much time he spends with them. She understands the business, of course, but Atlantis isn’t like anything else he’s ever done before. She left her friends, her career, her life behind in L.A., and on a particularly honest night last month she told him that if she had to make the choice between him and them again, she might make a different one. He probably shouldn’t have stormed out when she said it, but it was that or tell her that sometimes he _also_ wishes she were back in L.A., no matter what it would do to their family.  
  
Because he doesn’t, really. He hates the icy silence in the house when they’re mad at each other, but he can’t even imagine living there alone.  
  
“She doesn’t hate you guys,” he feels the need to assure Torri, because his cast-mates have been nothing but welcoming to his kids and his wife. _More_ than welcoming, when he thinks about David and Jane’s dinner invitations and Torri with her hands wrapped under Truman’s arms, holding him up to let him pretend to ride her very patient dog.  
  
Suddenly he’s spilling more than he intended to. “The screwed up part is that Kath should like Vancouver more than I do—the whole offbeat art scene. I thought she’d love it. I keep telling her to find a sitter and go out, she just—she never does anything she likes to do, and tells me it’s my fault for not being around enough.” He waves his hand, encompassing the night call and the show and all the time he spends getting Just One Drink with the cast after the day wraps and always leaving them before he’s ready to. It’s probably telling that he’d rather spend the night drinking cheap beer at David’s favorite watering hole listening to Torri retell the same six jokes than share a house with his wife after the kids are asleep. At least his coworkers actually seem to like him, most of the time.  
  
“Joe...” There’s more sympathy in her voice than he probably deserves. He didn’t really say anything she couldn’t have figured out, but he’s still not the type to air his dirty laundry, as his mother used to call it. Instead of comfort or advice, though, she asks, “Can I have my gun back?”  
  
It’s unexpected, and he laughs, and just like that, he feels better than he has in days. “_No,_” he tells her, wondering how she changed his whole mood so quickly, how she always manages to _do that_. “You won’t stop playing with it. Besides, it’s mine.”  
  
“It _was_ yours,” she corrects imperiously. “Until scene 16.”  
  
He jostles her shoulder, almost pushing her off the rock. “Okay, fine. Say it.”  
  
She’s pretending to glare at him, petulance mixed with affection. It’s an expression he’s only seen her use with him, and every time she does he feels a silly sense of pride. She recites, “‘We’re getting awfully far from the village.’”  
  
He grins, because he won. “‘I do this for a living, Elizabeth.’”  
  
“Radio,” she says, helpfully pointing to the prop clipped to his jacket. “Teyla advising us of our imminent doom.” She switches easily into character, eyes widening. “‘If they’ve already found the refuge, we might be too late.’”  
  
“‘Take this,’” he orders.  
  
Torri wants it, but Weir doesn’t. “‘John, I can’t-’”  
  
Martin’s script change calls for him to just look at her (“with that Sheppard intensity,” Andy directed), but Joe ad-libs, “You can. Trust me.”  
  
He presses the prop into her hand and her freezing cold fingers wrap around his. She makes no move to take the gun away from him. This close, huddled together against the rain, he thinks if this moment were in any other show, if they were any other two characters, he would kiss her.  
  
It startles him, because it isn’t that he hasn’t wondered, hasn’t thought about it more than he should, but—  
  
He _might_. His heart is pounding, her cold fingertips are just barely moving over his hands, they’re in costume and on location but she’s very much _Torri_ and not Weir and he can’t stop looking at her mouth and he thinks—  
  
The floodlights come on outside and Torri jerks back, almost jumping up to standing. Someone outside is yelling, “Let’s get this done!” and Joe feels cold in a way that has nothing to do with wet clothes or the middle of the night in British Columbia, and he doesn’t know if it’s because he almost forgot himself, or because he feels like he’s just been robbed.  
  
“We should go,” Torri says, and if she sounds disappointed, he’s probably just imagining it. They didn’t _do anything_, he reminds himself, and isn’t sure why that feels like a lie.  
  
They’re halfway to the staging area when she hands him the gun. “You start with this,” she reminds him unnecessarily.  
  
“Right.” It will be nice, once the cameras start rolling, to just be John Sheppard for a while.  
  
In the end, they edit out Elizabeth’s moment with a gun, and Joe’s there when they break the news.  
  
Torri shrugs it off, says, “Oh well. It was fun at the time.” When Andy keeps going with overdone apologies, she starts laughing. “Stop!” They’re already filming another episode, and she always seems to live very much in the moment. “Forget it!”  
  
Joe tries, but he can’t forget.  
  
  
**\- Saturday -**  
  
Joe does the math, even when he doesn’t want to. He keeps count of their indiscretions, lying in bed next to her or his wife and compressing each desperate encounter into a little black hash-mark on his soul—as though sins are like taxes and when he gets turned away at the pearly gates, he’s going to check Saint Peter’s receipts.  
  
Every hotel has a number, every bed and sofa and wall and shower; he knows how many months it’s been, how many _days_. He’s counted how many sips it takes her to finish her morning espresso, figured out the ratio of time spent in the rare Vancouver sun to the density of freckles across her nose. He knows how long, on the average, he can pretend it’s not going to happen again before it does.  
  
It’s not on purpose. Given the choice, he’d rather swim in a fog of lust-dazed ignorance, moving from moment to moment without a constant awareness of how he’s digging himself in deeper.  
  
As soon as he catches sight of the clock on Torri’s oven, he knows that they’ve been alone together for 18 hours and they haven’t had sex.  
  
He’s struck still, knife paused between the peanut butter jar and the plate where he’s making himself a snack. The hours spin back on their own, bright with opportunities they had to make this into a tryst. Last night, when he put in a movie and said _come on, we’ve got to get through these_ because they’re actors and it’s the Oscars and if someone asks, he can’t say he missed _Syriana_ because his face was between her thighs; this morning, when she let him sleep and he wandered out to find her lying across her yoga mat with next week’s script, and she said _I’ll make breakfast_ and he said _no, no, I’ve got it_, because the morning sun lit her so well he couldn’t bear for her to move; this afternoon, when he had his laptop open, feet on her coffee table, and she was reading that book she has to give back to David’s wife; when she drifted off on the couch and he could have woken her, but instead he walked her dog and washed their coffee mugs and opened all the right cabinet doors on the first try to make himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  
  
The mental tally sheet of indiscretions he doesn’t mean to be keeping no longer adds up, all his careful mathematical conclusions sliding out of alignment like peanut butter onto the floor. Sedge licks it up in an instant, licks his foot a few times for good measure, and Joe starts to panic.  
  
He paces around her apartment with her dog on his heels, Sedge’s eyes on his sandwich and his on every surface (time number sixteen, seventeen, twelve, two), until he reaches the bedroom. The frayed edges of the rag quilt are familiar between his fingers, the smooth maple of the bedposts, the dip of the mattress. He could map the place without looking, could walk between every piece of furniture in pitch dark. _Has_, four beers in, her legs around his waist and her laugh in his ears (_oh my god, turn a light on before you break something!_ because she doesn’t understand how thoroughly he categorizes things, how he’s memorized every pathway to and from her bed).  
  
Jesus, but he’s been short-sighted. They’re friends, on set. They do friend things. He saves her those weird jam muffins from craft services, they split the paper (he has minimal interest in heartwarming local news stories; she has no interest in finance), and she makes him look like an idiot in front of the others when she argues something so off-the-wall he can’t form sentences. Somehow David’s always around to announce it, _hey guys, Torri’s done it to Joe again_, while she preens with the know-it-all grin that made him want to smack her long before it made him want to kiss her.  
  
They were _only_ friends until they were lovers, and in the fading light of mid-afternoon it’s blindingly, stupidly inevitable that those two versions of them would merge together. This was never going to be just hotels and stolen fucks and the dwindling hope that curiosity and lust will eventually be satisfied and he can go back to his life. While he was keeping count, how didn’t he see this coming?  
  
His tour finishes in the living room, with her, one bare foot stretching past the afghan he draped over her when she drifted off (took the book out of her hands, marked her page with a take-out receipt, kissed that perfect warm spot on her temple he always does when he catches her sleeping, he’s been so _stupid_).  
  
He collapses in the chair across from her with a twist in his chest that has been there far longer than 18 hours, longer than 146 days. He has no idea if she knows. If she feels the same way. If he _wants _her to, because this is already a disaster, but _that—_  
  
He could put his mouth on the inside of her bare ankle, work his hands up her legs, peel off her clothes and nip the inside of her thigh while she stretches sleep from her muscles and he could do, right now, what he came here to do.  
  
He stays where he is and breathes as quietly as he can.  
  


**\- Tabloids -**  
  
“Kath?”  
  
It’s Tuesday, eleven a.m.. There’s an unexpected three-hour shooting delay, he forgot his phone, and David’s got everyone singing _O Canada_ at him because he made an unfortunate crack about the recent history of the Stanley Cup, and any of those is a good enough reason for him to get out of there before his mouth gets him into even more trouble.  
  
There’s no response. The boys are in school, but her car’s in the driveway and she’s not a napper, even when pregnant. She could be out for a walk, but something about the silence in the house sets the hair on the back of his neck on end.  
  
“_Kath?_”  
  
He walks into the bedroom on the hunt for his phone and finds their bed strewn with checkout counter rags, the kind she never buys. Katherine has her back to him, holding a black-and-white page, and his whole body runs cold.  
  
She doesn’t acknowledge him right away, so he peeks. He recognizes the story, if not the article—Jason and Simmone and Lisa—but he remembers the night those photos were taken. He was there, Torri was there, and he doesn’t think anything happened in view of the cameras, but Katherine can read him devastatingly well after all these years, and it’s entirely possible that his body language in the background of a grainy photo could give him away. Entirely foolish to think that his body language in their _home_ hasn’t already done so.  
  
It’s suddenly bold, glossy, headline-clear to him that he’s cheating on his wife, and she knows, and if they’re going to keep pretending it’s not happening, he’s going to have to lie to her face.  
  
“How long do you have?” she asks.  
  
He works words past the boulder in his throat. “An hour.”  
  
Katherine is practical, down to her bones; she’s not going to make him discuss it in the middle of a workday.  
  
“Are you—” he cuts himself off. He wants to walk around the bed to see her face, even if she’s crying. Even if she _isn’t._ He can’t make himself move. “Should I—”  
  
She sighs—long, drawn-out. “Your phone’s on top of the dishwasher, Joe.”  
  
She’s giving him a way out. He’s a coward, so he takes it.  
  


**\- Undertow -**  
  
Everything’s dark this season, _everything_. Their costumes, the lighting, the text—even the sky outside the condo he and Jason now share.  
  
Amanda isn’t, somehow, despite over a decade in the franchise that’s taking years off his life. She’s professional and positive and a generous scene partner, compassionate when it takes him seven takes to get through simple lines without fucking them up. “Let it be weird for a while,” she says. She must _know_, secrets on set being what they are, but she treats him like his problem is professional. “I’ve been through cast changes like this. It’ll be weird for the fans, too.”  
  
David, who definitely knows and never approved of their relationship, says something similar: “Use it. It’ll read well on camera.”  
  
Joe wonders how bad it is when his castmates are giving him first year drama school advice. One night near the end of last season, when he was buried inside her and confessing too much and it was all so heavy he couldn’t stand it, he begged _please, I need you to believe me_, and she said, _don’t worry, Joe,_ with an impish smirk that let him breathe again,_ you’re not that good of an actor. _  
  
And right now, he’s not—or if he is, it’s by accident and the grace of his co-stars and scripts that match his mood. If either of them ever watch the show again, he thinks both Torri and Katherine would see appropriate symbolism in him beating the shit out of himself with widespread collateral damage.  
  
It’s not that she doesn’t come back—she does, as a guest star. For seven days it’s almost normal, Jason’s bear hugs and jam muffins and a familiar, frenetic chemistry when the cameras roll, and he can almost see daylight. They’re all pretending, but they’re professional pretenders. David throws a dinner party, and Torri and Paul drink everyone’s dregs and smash the bottles into trash cans in the yard in a bout of gleeful catharsis that almost clears the air. Joe makes plans and promises and thinks _I can do this, I can do this._  
  
He can’t, though. He doesn’t. He doesn’t know the names of Aidan’s teachers or Truman’s new best friend, has no answer when Amanda asks him how many words his youngest can put together now. He stops staying with Torri when he comes to L.A., stops even _telling_ her he’s coming until he shows up on her doorstep at three in the morning and leaves before nine, because failing her to her face is more than he can stand.  
  
When she comes back to the show a second time, it’s like no one can pretend.  
  
He’s drinking alone over tomorrow’s scenes until the lines blur together when he overhears a phone call through the wall. He assumes it’s with Lisa until Jason says, _I know, but you should see him, Tor._  
  
He wishes, _wishes_ she would, but she can’t see through his cloud of depression any more than he can see through hers. He has no idea what to say anymore to make her _want_ to.  
  
Everyone needs something from him, and it’s been so long since he’s been able to give it to them, he starts to wonder if they really need it at all.  
  


**\- Vanity -**  
  
She’s always liked her shower—big and open, featuring a window with beveled glass and that ridiculous shower curtain of Shakespearean insults her brother gave her—but she doesn’t _love_ her shower until she has her once buttoned-up co-star in there and she combines forces with the nine-setting massaging showerhead to give him a blow job that makes him _scream_.  
  
She helps him slide down the wall on shaky legs, rinses her mouth, and turns off the water while he tries and fails to form words. This might be her best work, she thinks, enjoying her lingering simmer of arousal and the memory of him cursing and begging until he was too far gone to do even that. She sits back on her heels and lets herself look as smug as she wants to.  
  
When he finally speaks, it’s hoarse. “Oh my _God_.”  
  
She laughs at him, delighted. This time, she has no doubts that he’ll be returning to her, and _soon_. “I expect some complaints from the neighbors.”  
  
His hand slips on the shower floor as he tries to adjust his position. “Or invitations to dinner, at least.” He’s smiling, loose and adoring like she’s changed his whole view of the world for the better (she probably _has_), and well, now she knows what it takes to wipe the guilt off his face.  
  
She sits down next to him, squishes her toes into a shower poof that got knocked loose from its hook at some point along the way. The bathroom is warm from their long adventure (with all her thanks to whoever invented tankless water heaters), so she makes no move to grab a towel and cover up any of their nakedness.  
  
A chunk of her hair flopped in her face, and she notices something, extracts it from the rest to show it to him. “This is from you,” she says. She doesn’t pull the gray hair out, just holds it up as evidence. It’s not her first, and she’s come to terms with it—she’s over thirty-five and so is the character she plays, and God knows Doctor Elizabeth Weir lives a more stressful life than she does. Besides, it’s becoming a bit of a game to see how long it’ll take someone in Stargate authority to bring up that particular awkward conversation.  
  
He doesn’t deny her accusation. It’s probably not entirely untrue, either. “I’m going to give you more.”  
  
“Mmm,” she teases, letting her Exhibit A fall back into the rest of her hair. She pokes the wet curls on his chest, salt sprinkled in among the pepper. _He_ dyes his hair, the virile John Sheppard, the actor behind him with an ego that’s far too tempting for her not to tweak at least once a day. “One more, I think.”  
  
“A hundred.”  
  
“_Maybe_ a dozen.”  
  
He grins, competition flashing in his eyes. “A _thousand_.” They argued for a season and a half about every little thing before they fucked, and they don’t argue much anymore. Their characters don’t either, which might be part of it—The Method and all—but she prefers to draw a different conclusion.  
  
She mixes it up on him: “_Ten_ thousand.”  
  
It trips him up, like she hoped it would (once upon a time, that was the most fun she could get out of him), and his brow wrinkles. “How many hairs does a person have?”  
  
She read it once, in a women’s magazine. “A hundred thousand, ish. Blondes have the most.” She runs her fingers through his hair and wonders what he’ll do whenever he starts to lose it. If they’ll be friends then, and she’ll make fun of him. Lovers, and she’ll console him. While it’s the most likely outcome of all this, at this moment, she finds it impossible to believe they’ll be neither.  
  
“Well, then,” he says, agreeing with her, “at _least_ ten thousand of them will be my fault.”  
  
She’s tempted to push her advantage, but even as a joke, she doesn’t dare suggest that he be responsible for all of them.  
  
  
**\- Wife -**  
  
Torri realizes she never deleted Katherine Flanigan’s number from her phone when it pops up on the screen as an incoming call.  
  
There’s no reason for her to call anymore, none. _This is it_, she thinks, and it’s like she’s watching herself from outside, moving in slow-motion. She’s going to pick up the phone and learn that the brutally messy affair she ended three months ago is really, permanently over, the only way it ever can be—and she’s going to learn about it in the frozen foods aisle of an Albertsons in East L.A..  
  
She can’t quite breathe, but she croaks out, “Hello?”  
  
It takes Torri a long, awkward minute to process that no one is dead. It takes even longer to put together that the estranged wife of her former lover is calling to ask her out for a drink.  
  
“We used to be friends,” Katherine says, though that’s not exactly true. They used to be acquaintances, on the way to becoming friends before Torri took Katherine’s husband to bed.  
  
She’s still a little rattled from her initial morbid assumption about the phone call, and her fingers are going numb around a pint of Tillamook Double Dark Chocolate, and her damnable curiosity has been largely responsible for every other awkward evening of her life, so Torri says, “Why not?”  
  
She has 48 hours to feel weird about it before they meet. She thinks about calling Rachel, or Jason, to see what they know, but she owes them far too many answers before she can ask any questions of her own. (Why she’s ignoring their text messages. Why she bailed on the last three conventions, when she knew Rachel only agreed to the one in Miami because she thought Torri would be there. Why, that last time, she didn’t come back.)  
  
She doesn’t seriously consider calling Joe. She’s closed that door—for her sanity, for his—but also because it’s like going around Katherine’s back and somehow, belatedly, _that_ feels like one betrayal too many.  
  
Katherine smiles when Torri gets to the wine bar, just for a moment, like they really _are_ friends. It occurs to Torri that they probably have more in common now that neither of them are sleeping with Joe Flanigan.  
  
So it’s awkward, but after a glass and a half of weather and traffic, Katherine’s shoulders soften and Torri lets herself relax. Laugh, even, at something Katherine says about Aidan’s latest backyard culinary experiment.  
  
The awkwardness, the 90-minute drive to a wine bar she’s never heard of, the elephant in the room—it’s all worth it, to hear about the boys. Katherine shares more anecdotes than she deserves, even breaks out her phone to show a few recent pictures. Torri sees Joe in them so strongly it hurts, but that’s not the only thing that does—she has _missed_ them, even if she never had a right to. Even if that’s been so much harder to name than everything else she misses.  
  
She had to get over Elizabeth Weir before it swallowed her. She decided she had to get over Joe, too, when waiting by the phone for stunted conversation began to turn her into someone she couldn’t stand. She never considered that she’d have to get over them, too.  
  
“Tru won’t stop bugging me about getting a dog. His whole room is covered with dog pictures. He still sleeps with that toy you gave him.”  
  
Torri winces, remembering the fight Joe and Katherine had over the phone about it. “Sorry about that.” She was washing dishes with water so hot it burned through the rubber gloves, mad about the argument, mad at herself for her involvement in it, mad at him for not having the decency anymore to even leave the room when he fought with his wife about her. She wasn’t as kind as she could have been when he turned to her for sympathy. _You were supposed to say it was from you. If you would ever just listen to me…_  
  
She’s managed to forget some things, but she can’t forget the broken look on his face when he said, _I just want them to like you_.  
  
Katherine says, “We’re getting divorced.”  
  
Torri barely swallows the wine in her mouth without choking. “I’m sorry,” she manages, but it’s a social reflex, the thing one is supposed to say. She’s too shocked to work herself into a real apology for anything that’s happened.  
  
Katherine pours herself another glass and tops off Torri’s, a subtle way of blocking a quick escape.  
  
It shouldn’t be a surprise. Torri knows he didn’t go back to her—Jason told her as much when she was still answering his calls—but she assumed he’d go back _eventually_. Assumed, foolishly, that Katherine would let him.  
  
“I pulled the trigger—I couldn’t stand it anymore. You know how long it takes him to get his head around something enough to make a decision.”  
  
Torri wonders if that’s why she’s here—because she _does_ know, and she might be the only one that does. She feels a sudden solidarity, a need to fix what she broke.  
  
“He loves you,” and if it’s not quite the right word, it’s the closest one she’s found in three months of examining the wreckage in the harsh light of retrospect. Joe spent most of the last three years in and out of Torri’s bed, begging and promising and once, swearing through angry tears that he _couldn’t live without her_, and he stayed married through all of it. “You were _always_ the one he _really_–”  
  
Katherine silences her with a glare. Okay, Torri thinks, gathering herself. Too much honesty, if it’s even honest at all.  
  
“He’s letting me make all the custody decisions. He’s just… agreeing to everything.” It’s the first time all evening that Katherine sounds bitter. Torri remembers Joe saying once, about something, _Katherine’s the fair one_. “I expected him to put up more of a fight.”  
  
Torri thinks, _I did, too_.  
  
Her heart is still breaking, and this time, she thinks it’s for him. There was never more than a day or two, if that, between her and Katherine in the months when he was going back and forth. It’s why distance ruined them so easily, why the worst punishment Katherine could give him was moving back to L.A.: he doesn’t know how to be alone.  
  
“The show’s ending,” she says.  
  
Katherine tilts her head, confused—the same look Aidan has. “I know.”  
  
“He’ll be back in L.A.. He won’t be working sixteen hour days anymore. You could just… pretend…” She realizes how stupid it is as she’s saying it and waves a hand around, trying to encompass the three of them and all of Vancouver and the last five years—_pretend it never happened?_  
  
Katherine says, “Pretend you were a fluke?”  
  
It’s like icy water being thrown in her face. Jesus. God. She can’t breathe, can’t _see, _and her ears are ringing like something exploded_._  
  
She let a man who’d been faithful for over a decade ruin his life. She convinced herself she’d found true love in illicit sex, in something that started so drunk in Jason’s bedroom she doesn’t even _remember_. She crushed her heart to pieces and held him all night when he couldn’t live with himself, bought him shirts in the wrong size and ate his terrible cooking and read stories to his sons like one day she’d be their _stepmother_. She got fired and moved and burst into tears in a goddamn Wal-Mart while he begged _please, please_ down the phone line, and when she couldn’t or wouldn’t make herself easy for him anymore, he let go. Again and again and again, until she had only enough left to say _no more_. She cut off her friends and gave away the character that’ll be the first line of her obituary because she couldn’t bear to look at him over a script and hear him say goodbye to her—and all that, _all that_ because they got cast in the same show and spent too much time together, because they drank too much, because she always _always _wanted to know where this would go more than she wanted to stop it. She loved him, she _still does_, and none of it even _matters._ “God, I was a _fluke._”  
  
Katherine’s hand is on her wrist as her vision clears, grounding her. The wine glass is gone, replaced with water. “No,” Katherine says, with surprising care. “No, I don’t think you were.”  
  
  
**\- Ex -**  
  
Joe and Katherine sign the papers together. If he tried, he couldn’t count how many autographs he’s signed since his wedding license. She’s been signing his last name for years with no plans to change it. He thinks the pen should be heavier.  
  
They start their divorced life by going out to dinner.  
  
“This is weird,” he says, because it is. He can breathe a little easier now, though, since they set the date. Since they explained it to the boys, went shopping as a family to buy calendars, helped them fill in the custody schedule so they can understand. Since Katherine handed him a list of doctor’s appointments and school meetings for his own calendar and said _I’m not going to remind you about these anymore_. Since they met with the state-required custody mediator, the accountant, both their lawyers, and he agreed to everything. Since he told his family, and she told hers.  
  
He’s utterly, desperately lonely. There’s a strange relief in finally getting what he deserves.  
  
Three weeks ago, he was at a convention with Paul and Rachel and David, the first time he saw any of them since they wrapped. He was among friends and they got him a little drunk, sat close to him in David’s hotel suite and let him bitch and complain until Rachel said, _you’re going to have to grow up_, and right up until she said it, he thought he already was.  
  
“This… guy,” he says, “Robert. Is it serious?”  
  
Katherine raises her eyebrows, across the table, reminding him that as of 4:15 that afternoon, it’s none of his business.  
  
She says, “If I’m going to introduce him to the boys, I’ll let you know first.”  
  
Right—how it’s supposed to be done. Fair and considered, and so much like Katherine that it hurts. “I’m sorry,” he says.  
  
She brushes him off. “I know.”  
  
He touches her hand across the table and her eyes lift up to meet his. He says it again, thinking of the first eleven years, when he tried and _succeeded_. “I’m sorry.”  
  
He thinks they both realize, at exactly the same time, that they’re saying goodbye. She turns her hand over and holds his for a long minute before letting go. It’s not a brush-off, this time. “I know.”  
  
  
**\- Yet -**  
  
Jason texts her to let her know. After all this time, and ringside seats from beginning to bitter end, he still pops up in her phone once in a while to play matchmaker.  
  
Curiosity—or dread—gets the better of her and she googles it, breathes a sigh of relief when her name doesn’t appear in the barely-there mention on TMZ. She’s never been so grateful for the end of their collective fifteen minutes of fame.  
  
In spite of herself, she texts Jason: _Is he okay?_  
  
It’s an hour before he replies. _Im sposed to tell u he is._  
  
She locks her phone in the car. She leaves it in the glove box overnight while she lies awake, watching the worst television she can find to drown out the vivid reel in her head_._ She doesn’t know which she’s avoiding: the possibility that he’ll call her, in spite of everything, or the knowledge that he won’t. The night she ended it, he called himself _broken_, and she told him she had already picked up all the pieces of him she ever will.  
  
But this—a cancelled show, a cancelled marriage, _alone_—God help her, she _would again_.  
  
He doesn’t call and after a few days pass, her head clears. One by one, her nosy Stargate friends reach out to ask if she’s heard from him, then offer some version of _that’s probably for the best_. She expects one of them to break the news that he’s found someone else, but weeks pass. Months.  
  
It seems impossible that he hasn’t. One of the first times they all went out as a cast, they swapped stories about their wayward youths—in Rainbow’s case, his wayward youth still in progress—and when they got to Joe, he shrugged and told them, _I haven’t been single since I was nineteen._  
  
Eventually she asks, shame be damned. There’s far too much sympathy in Rachel’s voice. “I haven’t heard anything.”  
  
“_Yet_,” Torri adds, when Rachel doesn’t.  
  
She goes to conventions, signs promotional photos of the two of them together and tries not to spend too much time on regret—how it happened, how it ended. That they aren’t friends anymore. At best, one day they’ll sit on the same panels and reminisce in front of strangers about funny things that happened while the cameras were rolling.  
  
They were always temporary, a string of moments that coalesced into a relationship. They were never building a life together. It’s strange, then, that after the anger and hurt settle into a quiet melancholy, the regret that lingers most is that she’ll never see him grow old.  
  
  
**\- Zing -**  
  
Joe runs the same sides four times before lunch with four different women.  
  
It’s weird to be on this side of the table—inasmuch as he is. He’s not auditioning, technically, because the executive producers have already cast him as the lead in their spinoff sci-fi show, but there’s still a _pending network approval_ hanging over his head, and that’ll be as much about how the Atlantis ensemble tests together as it will about him.  
  
So he’s nervous, and he’s trying to pretend he isn’t. Rob Cooper and Brad Wright and Peter DeLuise might ask his opinion about each potential Weir (_new_-Weir, DeLuise calls her—when Joe was going through call-backs, he read opposite Jessica Steen), but the high-level conversation will continue long after he goes home for the night.  
  
When they ask him, he has no idea what to say. They’re all good actors, all beautiful and well-suited to the character description (except for the second one, who was far too young, and so relentlessly sweet that Joe could barely get through the argument on the page without feeling like he was yelling at Aidan’s kindergarten teacher). They’ve all been through at least two rounds of auditions before making it here, and they know far more about the character they’re reading than he does.  
  
Over lunch, when the producers rehash the morning and give the kindergarten teacher more consideration than Joe expects, he finally admits: “I don’t know what you’re looking for.” The fact that they’re still looking at seven actors this far into the process of a recast suggests _they_ might not know.  
  
“That _zing_,” Brad says (or something like it—it’s a sound as undefinable as what it represents). “We’ll know it when we see it.”  
  
_Good_, Joe thinks, while the others laugh about something notorious that happened when Chris Judge auditioned for SG-1. _Because I sure won’t_.  
  
The fifth potential new-Weir is named Torri, and he sizes her up while she goes through the hello’s—brunette, casually confident, tall enough in heels to look him in the eye. Her handshake is warm, solid without gripping, and there’s something different about the way she greets him that takes a minute to place. The others were sucking up to him a little, he realizes, and she isn’t.  
  
The others didn’t pick a fight with him, either. Or, hell, maybe he starts it, almost on her way out the door, because he’s keyed up like their scene hasn’t ended. There’s something frustrating about the way she whipped through the lines, like she was cutting him off or changing words around or _something_, and regardless, when John Sheppard failed to get the last word, it didn’t feel like he was acting.  
  
Torri leaves after their strangely adversarial goodbye, and Joe turns around, a little angry, a little flustered, to find the other men all watching him with open amusement. Brad is smiling, DeLuise is all but laughing at him, and Cooper looks relaxed for the first time all day.  
  
_Oh_.  
  
The frustration evaporates into anticipation. He has no idea where she ranked on their list before walking in, and it’s all _pending network approval_ anyway, but this won’t be her last round, he’s sure of it. Whatever happens, he’ll get at least one chance to square off with her again.  
  
This is going to be fun.  
  
  
**\- & -**  
  
Torri’s been dawdling at the farmer’s market for most of the morning, letting Sedge sniff every basket and table leg. She has a stack of papers on her breakfast table, scripts to read and receipts to file and nothing that particularly lights her up, so she’s procrastinating with sun and heirloom tomatoes and chats with farmers. One of them flirts with her as he teaches her about different types of honeybees, and when she finally walks home, it’s with a free box of tiny jars for her to taste and report back on. (_You and your boyfriend…?_ he said, fishing, and she didn’t take the bait, because she enjoys being a little mysterious.)  
  
When she rounds the corner to her apartment, _Joe’s_ there.  
  
Sedge pulls at the leash and Torri drops it. The blur of white wagging and whining and licking on her front steps gives her a moment to remember how to breathe.  
  
He’s crouching on the sidewalk, covered in excited dog. “She _remembers_ me!” He sounds surprised, and looks different somehow—not just different than he was the last time they saw each other (the wrap party, circling opposite sides of the room), but different than she’s ever seen him.  
  
He’s tanned, for one thing, living in L.A. instead of Vancouver, but that’s not it.  
  
She says, “Of course she remembers you. What are you doing here?”  
  
He looks up, and she steels herself against the impulse to step _closer._ She wants to touch his sun-warmed skin, to map each unfamiliar line from a long, hard year.  
  
She tightens her hands around her market bags, just in case.  
  
“You look good.” He’s not wearing sunglasses, and he’s staring at her like he’s breathing fresh air. “Jesus, Torri, you look _really_—” He clears his throat. “—that’s not—I mean, you _do_, but that’s not what I wanted to open with here.”  
  
“You started with the dog,” she points out. That’s usually a safe bet, with her.  
  
He nods a few times and then stands up. Sedge shoves her head into Joe’s hand, shameless. Torri lets the silence spread out between them until he says:  
  
“I waited.”  
  
“You could’ve called,” she says, thinking he means this morning, because he might have been waiting on her steps for three hours while she picked out tomatoes and learned about bees, but then she realizes he means something more than that. She reaches back in her memory, tries to recall what time of year it was when Jason texted her about Joe’s divorce. It’s been almost—  
  
Knowing Joe, it’s been _exactly_ six months, probably to the day. She wonders if he’s been planning this awkward moment for almost that long.  
  
“I couldn’t call. I had to do this in person. I’m not…” he looks up at the sky for a moment, like he’s calling in celestial help, then back to her. “_We’re_ not good on the phone.”  
  
She can feel it between them, that shock of energy that has tied them together since they met. Right now it’s like a live power line, dancing on the ground between them, and she closes her eyes to keep from automatically grabbing it.  
  
For the better part of five years, she fit herself around him—for most of that time, she _wanted_ to. There are reasons she was drawn to a married man who couldn’t give her all of himself. So much about being the other woman, about what she gave and what she asked for, had nothing to do with Joe having a wife.  
  
She played with the truth—what she felt, what she said, what she wanted. The rough soul-searching she did after Atlantis stripped all the varnish off.  
  
She opens her eyes. “I won’t be your mistress again.”  
  
“I know,” he says. “I’d never ask you to. I don’t want that.”  
  
“What _do_ you want?”  
  
He spreads his arms wide, open-ended, and she finally figures out what’s different about him:  
  
He’s not pretending.  
  
For as long as she’s known him, he’s been trying to live into pre-defined roles—the leading man, the devoted father, the husband, the lover. Even when his crumbling identities pulled him under, he wouldn’t let them go.  
  
That part of him fascinated her, early on—she wanted to peek through all the cracks, to decode him like a character on the page. She longed to _know_ him, and for all that came after, the raw and unguarded moments she collected and cherished and sewed together, she never fully succeeded. It’s only now she realizes: she may have undressed him a hundred times, but she never looked directly at him.  
  
She is, now, and he takes her breath away. She never even _imagined_. He’s put himself together, and he’s offering himself to her, _all_ of him.  
  
She asked him what he wants, and he says, with a boyish shrug, “I want to come in.”  
  
She drops her bags to the ground, tomatoes and honey be damned, and wraps herself around him, presses her heart to his. He folds her in close, crushing, his nose buried in her hair.  
  
“Let’s start _over_,” he whispers, rough.  
  
“No,” she says, and presses a kiss to the side of his face. “Let’s start something new.”  
  
  
**\- end -**


End file.
